| System Profile: Excel Beef |
SIC: 2011 |
Hytrol Conveyor System Provides Many Benefits
Using Hytrol’s high-speed sortation system, Excel Beef is able
to quickly and efficiently move product through its facility. The
installation of the Hytrol system was executed without any unplanned
downtime. |
Excel Corporation, a division of Cargill, Inc., specializes in beef processing
for the consumer market and provides various grades of boxed beef products
to wholesale/retail distributors and high-volume users. The Dodge City,
KS facility has operated since the mid-1980s as Excel’s first fully
automated warehouse.
The Desired Solution:
In the late 1990’s, Excel Beef started using pallet-based ‘ship
to order’ automated systems. The reason was that many of Excel’s
customers no longer wanted beef boxes being lumped into trucks, forcing
a labor-intensive process on receipt. More often, pallet orders needed
to be delivered; a significant change for the plant distribution operation.
The Solution Implemented
Dodge City, which had been running with mechanized distribution system
for many years, had to be converted from a case loading direct-to-truck
operation to a pallet-shipping process without interrupting its daily
business. To meet the new business model, new AS/RS storage buffers and
associated box sortation, accumulation and transport would need to be
managed, along with high-speed palletizing and stretch wrapping.
The solution was delivered by System Integrator, Retrotech Incorporated,
and their project partner, Cisco Eagle Incorporated. Retrotech had retrofitted
the aging 1980’s order delivery system at Dodge City and developed
business-specific software to continue high volume handling and shipping
postponement strategies. The custom software visibility allows the production
and shipping managers to make the right decisions in filling orders and
setting demands on the production floor.
Today, the ‘new’ order delivery system ships over 90 trucks
a day in two shifts with orders ranging from 1 SKU per truck to completely
mixed products, often all on pallets. Some orders only have hours or minutes
to be satisfied from the time the right product arrives from the box sealers.
Customer:
Excel Beef
Dodge City, Kansas
|
Distributor:
Cisco-Eagle, Inc.
Dallas, Texas
Little Rock, Arkansas
Tulsa, Oklahoma |
System Integrator:
Retrotech, Inc.
Fishers, New York |
Key Benefits:
• On
demand palletized loads that reduce the customer’s receiving
labor.
• Record-breaking productivity allowing a shift
reduction to occur.
• Visibility allowing managers to make
the right decisions.
• New system implementation without
affecting the existing shipping system output. |
System Hy-Lites
• Facility
Size: 35,000 sq. ft. (expansion area)
• Employees: 2,750
total
• Product Handled: Boxes of processed beef
•
Types of Conveyors: Slider bed & roller bed horizontal, slider
bed & roller bed incline, chain roller, 1.9 and 2.5 live roller
curve, Hytrol EZLogic™ zero-pressure accumulating, belt curve,
high-speed sortation, gravity wheel and roller, Hytrol “Gapper”. |
 |
 |
Boxes enter the main storage and distribution
area on multi-level lines of Hytrol RB roller conveyor. |
In the shipping area, Hytrol conveyor
is used to
move goods into waiting trucks. The conveyor
sections are mounted on portable units that can
be extended into the trailers |
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